OmiseGO Pte. Ltd. Structure and ICO Resources
I would like to take this opportunity to clarify our overall organizational structure, in order to avoid any further confusion. OmiseGO Pte. Ltd. is one of the 7 subsidiary companies that is 100% owned by Omise Holdings Pte. Ltd. OmiseGO is the only subsidiary that focuses on blockchain technology.
Earlier in 2017, OmiseGO Pte. Ltd. conducted an ICO to raise funds for building out the OMG blockchain and white-label wallet SDK. The ICO fund remains at the OmiseGO entity level and will strictly be used towards delivering the milestones outlined in OmiseGO crowd sale document.
The ICO fund will not be used to support any of the other Omise Holding subsidiaries or operations.
Our High-level Strategy
At Omise, we focus on building solutions that directly tackle the fundamental daily problems we see in society. Our experience with operating a payment business over the past 4 years has shed light on the fundamental issues impeding both the adoption of online payments in general and financial inclusiveness in particular. The four core challenges worth highlighting include:
1. Limited availability of digital currencies or online payment acceptance by merchants.
2. Siloed wallet and payment services impeding the usability and functionality.
3. Low rate of credit card adoption. This is particularly true in the Asia-Pacific region where information about a user’s credit score, needed to apply for credit card, is not as easily accessible.
4. Continued limited coverage and penetration of traditional financial services- e.g. bank branches, bank accounts.
Solution for Challenge 1
Since 2014, Omise has been tackling the issues related to online payment and increasing merchant acceptance in the Asia-Pacific Region. Now we are expanding beyond the region, as well as launching several offline solutions. With increasing demand for Omise payment services and the drive to expand merchant acceptance, we made the decision to acquire Paysbuy, a digital payment provider based in Thailand, further growing the Omise payment ecosystem.
Solution for Challenge 2
The OMG Decentralized Exchange Network (DEX) — a publicly-run and publicly-owned platform which facilitates the exchange and transfer of any digital value — will enable wallets and payment systems to seamlessly interoperate with each other. This is a very powerful shift to liberalize the way people can send, receive, and hold their digital value, ultimately changing the way commerce is conducted. Imagine if you can use your Thai wallet (operating in Thai Baht) to pay for goods in Japan; completely bypassing the need to physically take out cash and convert Thai Baht into Japanese Yen before spending, or the need to depend on a third party to do the conversion for you. With the OMG DEX you will be able to just take your smart phone to pay for goods and services anywhere in the world.
Solution for Challenge 3
73% of the people living in Southeast Asia do not have access to (or choose not to rely on) traditional forms of financial services. This population, which may include students, low income workers, decentralized technologists, etc, form a large part of the productive global economy that may not conform to the credit policy/score institutional “standard”. Building on Omise’s founding vision of “online payments for everyone”, we plan to combine the Omise payment business along with the upcoming OMG DEX, and OmiseGO’s wallet services, to provide alternative low-transaction-fee, decentralized, mobile (and optionally, plastic card) payment services that are user-friendly… so user-friendly, in fact, that they become the preferred payment method of people who today use traditional financial services. We will show you what it means, to ‘Unbank the Banked’.
Solution for Challenge 4
Traditional financial services rely heavily on legacy, brick-and-mortar infrastructure. In a world where Internet penetration is over 130%, physical banking and ATM infrastructure should not be a limiting factor to achieving financial inclusion. As a group, Omise has plans to help promote financial inclusion without relying heavily on physical banking infrastructure (bank branches, ATMs, agents, etc), by connecting the “banked” and the “unbanked” population. By connecting these populations, we go beyond financially inclusive service, to financially equitable service. More details about this will be shared in the coming months.
To address the 4 challenges,
I have broken up the solutions into 3 layers.
Layer 1 : Omise Payment Acceptance Layer.
This layer is crucial to help accelerate the transaction growth on the OMG network. Can you imagine having a credit card without a credit card acceptance machine? This scenario is parallel to the OMG network, where there is a need for points where merchants can accept payments/transactions that happen across the network. *Of course also we can also use existing eWallet provider acceptance.
Layer 2 : OmiseGO (OMG) Decentralized Exchange Network
The OMG network acts as a backbone infrastructure in which digital transactions / cash-in / out transactions can take place. As the highly scalable Plasma decentralized exchange (plasma.io), the OMG network will act as a single point of execution trading engine and will provide the fastest transaction services available in the market, finally enabling true micro-transactions across a blockchain network, and with the lowest costs/margins that naturally come from having the deepest decentralized liquidity pool available.
Layer 3 : Decentralized Cash-in / cash-out touch point
To utilize the OMG network, there is still a need to digitize cash into digital currency. This third layer provides a solution for each cash-in/out. This solution will be revealed at the end of the year.
Thank you for your time and interest everyone. As you can see, we have some ambitious plans here, which I am always happy to keep our community up-to-date on. Please feel free to ping me on Twitter or Slack if you have any questions.
Our official channels
Slack : https://omgslack.omise.co
Twitter : https://twitter.com/omise_go
reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/omise_go/
Web : https://omg.omise.co
Tech stack whitepapers : https://cdn.omise.co/omg/whitepaper.pdf &
https://plasma.io/plasma.pdf
Omise / OmiseGO Founder
Jun Hasegawa
